I get a lot of emails from blog readers every week and as many of you know, I take the time to respond to every single one of them. Heck, if you’re going to take the time to read what I write, I will take the time to respond to you and help in any way I can. Unfortunately this often leaves me as the bearer of bad news as I have to tell people every week that what they thought was investments, are really just collectables, often valuable only to them.

Now there is nothing wrong with making mistakes, that’s how we all learn, it’s not learning from your mistakes that can be dangerous. Domaining can be an incredible investment opportunity, or a massive waste of money, just like real estate or the stock market, it all depends on what kind of return you are making on your investment, or lack thereof.

So I decided that I would put together a simple quiz that you can take to determine if you are actually making investments, or just building-up a collection of domains that will sit, collecting digital dust, for years to come. After taking the quiz, if you find-out you aren’t really investing, good! Now is the perfect time to make a change and turn things around, identifying bad habits is the first step to creating good ones.

Answer the questions below honestly and at the end I’ll let you know whether you are investing, or just collecting.

1. How much money did you spend on domain names in 2011?
2. How much money did you make from selling domain names in 2011?
3. How much money did you make from monetizing domain names 2011?
4. Did you turn down any offers on domain names you own? If so, what was the total of the offers?

Remember, an investment is something that pays you. Take a look at how much you spent on domain names and compare this to what you made selling and monetizing domain names. If you are spending more money than you are making, you might be tricking yourself into thinking you are investing, when in fact you are collecting.

However, there is a caveat here, if you turned-down offers that could have made the year profitable then you might have some solid investments, and yes, it’s okay to wait to sell these when you’re ready, and for the price you want.

So where do you go from here?

Well, if you are an investor, pat yourself on the back! This is a very challenging industry and if you’re making real investments, you should be proud!

If it turns-out that you’re a collector, don’t panic! Take this post as your wake-up call. Stop buying domain names that you can’t sell and don’t make you money. Look at how much money you spent on domain names last year and look at how you could have spent that money better, most likely on fewer domains. There are lots of incredible resources out there to learn more about how to make good investments.

Want to make money selling domains? Make sure to watch my interview with Toby Clements and he’ll help point you in the right direction.

Want to make money developing and monetizing domains? Make sure to read my article on Domain Development 101.

(Photo Credit)

Toby Clements is one those people that just has a natural gut instinct for domain names. He can look at a list of domains and quickly identify which ones could sell, and which may be sitting in their owners portfolio collecting dust.

One of the top questions I get from blog readers is, “What kind of domains should I be buying this year?” It’s a great question, and there is nobody better to answer it than Toby! So I was able to spend a few minutes with Toby last week, picking his brain and getting an understanding of where he sees liquidity for Domainers in 2012. This really is a must-watch interview, so stop reading this and click the play button below!

As day two winds down I made my way to PITCHfest, one of the coolest events at DOMAINfest! Entrepreneurs have the chance to pitch their ideas in front of a panel of expert judges. The first company to present was Akashic, a cloud computing solution looking to innovate in the space. Next up was Wealth Investors who unfortunately, even after watching their presentation I couldn’t tell you what they heck they do!

StratoSquare was next introducing a solution for helping people better understand their investments and identify options that might be a good fit for them. Babafoo took the stage and introduced what they are calling “Linked In For High School Athletes.” Their site has been up for three months so they’re just starting to understand how people will use it and where they need to improve the system.

Following Babafoo is one of my favorites – Protrada. As you all probably know by now I’m a huge fan of Protrada and Troy Rushton, their CEO gave a great pitch of what they are doing to help people acquire, manage, and develop domains. Prenostik, the next company pitching is helping companies understand how ad spending translates into sales.

Eye-Predict wins my award for the most entertaining pitch and a pretty cool solution for optimizing catalogs. The founder did a great job of keeping this pitch fun and adding some humor to the presentation! FilmBreak calls themselves a dynamic online funding and distribution platform for independent filmmakers. Think of this as AngelList for the entertainment industry – very cool!

The last company to present is Splashoo, a social network for ratings. People can vote on things like who will win the Super Bowl, to your favorite restaurant, to your favorite professor. The idea is to allow people to share rankings and connect with other people who have similar interests or views.

After the pitches, the panel of investors had the opportunity to ask entrepreneurs questions about their businesses. At the end, audience members were able to vote for the best combined score with Babafoo taking the cake with 26% of the votes. After the audience choice award comes the judges choice…and the winner is – Akashic!

Now that PITCHfest is over it’s time for the second party of the conference taking place at the Petersen Auto Museum. This is a very cool spot for Domainers to network and check-out some of the coolest cars on the planet. As a big auto geek myself I am really looking forward to this one!

As you all know, I don’t blog about the parties so what happens at the Petersen Museum, stays at the Petersen Museum…right?

(Photo Credit)

There is a shift going on, you might not see it yet, but it’s happening – a strong interest is coming from investors across Asia and many of the top Domainers out there are cashing-in. If you attended a Domaining Conference last year then you couldn’t have missed this one – industry leaders got up and said, there is a very strong, growing interest in domain names coming from the Asian market, specifically China.

Sites like 4.CN have grown considerably in the past year and catering to investors that buy beyond numeric domains which was the original focus of the site. Short, brandable .COMs are hot and investors around the world are scooping them up, this is causing a shift as some of the best domains make their way to new homes, many of these in China.

Hong Kong has been on the Domaining map for some time now especially with .Asia headquartered in the city. The .Asia organization has done a great job of raising awareness about Domain Names all across Asia, but like many companies choose Hong Kong as their home-base. Popular Domaining company PPX has offices in Hong Kong and there are a number of Domain Investors who call Hong Kong home.

So what’s the big deal here? The big deal, as I see it, is the great opportunity for the Domaining community to grow as a whole. There’s a great community of Domain Investors in Asia and we should all be working together, making deals, and growing the space. As savvy investors you should always be asking yourself where the activity is in the market and how you can network with people investing in the space.

So put Hong Kong on your radar if you haven’t already. It’s a beautiful city and might just be one of the Domaining capitals of the world soon, if it’s not already!

One of the most common questions I get from blog readers is, “What registrar should I use for my domains?” I personally keep most of my domains between Go Daddy and Moniker, and a handful of other registrars. I’ve always had a great experience with both of these registrars but with so many other registrars out there it’s not fair for me to only promote these two. So I’ve decided to run a completely unbiased 2012 Domain Registrar Showdown.

The idea here is that I will evaluate a number of registrars based on five key qualities that I think we all agree are pretty darn important. I’m still picking the final list of registrars I will be evaluating, feel free to recommend a few. I have finalized the criteria I will be using, both are listed below!

Registrar Evaluation Criteria

1. Technical Support – how long do I have to wait on hold before I get a real person? (I will be calling three times to get a fair average)
2. Registration and Renewal Fees – how much does it cost to manage your portfolio at a registrar?
3. Security – not all registrars are created equal when it comes to security, I’ll be getting under the hood to find-out which have the best security.
4. User Interface – does the registrar provide an easy-to-use interface or is it like navigating a maze?
5. Hosting – does the registrar offer hosting options, if so how good are they?

Registrars To Be Evaluated

• Go Daddy
• Moniker
• Dotster
• NameCheap
• Name.com
• OnlyDomains.com
• 101Domain.com
• Epik
• DomainIt
• 1&1
• Network Solutions
• Register.com
• Fabulous
• eNom
• FastDomain.com
• Domain Monster

If you notice that a registrar that you use is missing from the list please let me know and I’ll make sure to add it to the evaluation. The entire process will take roughly one month and I plan to share the results in mid-to-late February. Stay-tuned, more to come!

With 2012 now in full swing Jason and I decided it was time to have our first Southern California Domainer MeetUp of 2012! This will mark our tenth MeetUp and the beginning of a great year with three more MeetUps planned for 2012.

The MeetUp will be held on Monday, January 30th in Santa Monica. We are still finalizing the location and will update our MeetUp page as soon as we have a venue picked. So what’s going on at our first MeetUp of 2012? We are going to have a nice range of guest speakers each sharing with you some great tips and tricks to help you start off 2012 with a bang! Our speakers will be covering the following topics:

• Buying Domains
• Selling Domains
• Domain Development/Monetization
• Brand Development
• Social Media

We are also very excited to announce the sponsor for our first MeetUp of the year – Protrada! You’ve heard me talk a lot about Protrada lately and this will be a great opportunity to meet the Protrada team themselves and learn how you can leverage their platform to help make 2012 your best year yet!

This is not cost to attend this MeetUp and no limit to the number of people who can come. All that we ask is you bring and open mind and a ton of business cards! Of course DOMAINfest starts the following day and there really is no better way to start-off your year than attending this conference, if you haven’t registered yet, what are you waiting for!

See you in Santa Monica!

]]> http://morganlinton.com/announcing-the-first-southern-california-domainer-meetup-of-2012/feed/ 3 http://morganlinton.com/affiliate-summit-west-2012-here-i-come/ http://morganlinton.com/affiliate-summit-west-2012-here-i-come/#comments Fri, 06 Jan 2012 17:21:05 +0000 Morgan http://morganlinton.com/?p=4899

Well 2012 is now in full swing which means it’s time to start making deals and putting-together partnerships for the year. One of my absolute favorite conferences to kick-off a new year is Affiliate Summit West in Las Vegas. This will be my third year attending the conference and if you’re interested in Domain Development and Monetization – this is the go-to conference of the year.

Since I know that many of my readers might not be familiar with this conference I wanted to provide a brief introduction to the show and what value it has provided to me. First and foremost, Affiliate Summit is the largest Affiliate show out there which means you get just about every single Affiliate Marketing company on the planet. This means that really no matter what niche your site(s)/domain(s) are in, there are probably one, two, or ten affiliate programs out there with products to sell.

So how could you possibly meet all of these companies? Affiliate Summit has figured that out as well with the Meet Market. This is my favorite part of the show and happens on the opening day. Affiliate Marketing Companies setup tables in a large ballroom where attendees can then go from table to table meeting each company and understanding what they do.

I find the Meet Market is also a great place to get a better feeling for what’s hot in the Affiliate space. After spending an hour walking around the room there’s a good chance you will have met over 50 companies and have some excellent options for monetizing your sites. The great thing about having the Meet Market the first day of the show is that then for the next two days you know a lot more people and you can easily schedule meetings with some of the best companies you met with.

Affiliate Summit has seminars on topics that are incredibly relevant to Domain Developers. Heck – the first talk of the show is called “The Future of Content Monetization and Publishing” and going on simultaneously is a talk on “25 ways you can improve your website.” It doesn’t get much better than that and with three days of seminars you can learn what takes most people a year or two, in a matter of days.

Every year I leave Affiliate Summit with some great new contacts and all my monetization partners set for the year. It’s a great way to start-off 2012 and as always I’ll be bringing all of you along for the ride. Stay-tuned, I leave for Vegas tomorrow night! If you’d like to learn more about Affiliate Summit and why you should be there you can take a look at the video below:

Welcome to the first of a three-part series I’ll be doing this week reflecting on what worked and what didn’t work last year. Rather than doing one incredibly long post I decided to split this into three posts, the first focusing on Domain Development, the next on Domain Sales, and the last one on running a Domain Investing Business. 2011 was a record-breaking year from me across the board but that certainly doesn’t mean that everything I did worked, plenty of things failed and that’s what I learned the most from.

Now is the perfect time for all of you to review 2011 even if it was a stellar success, and try to look for ways to optimize your business in 2012. Since a majority of my income comes from my developed domains I thought this would be a great place to start. I ran lots of tests last year to take an already working strategy and make it even better. I am happy to say that I ended 2011 with a revenue growth of 120% y/y which exceeded my goals by 20%! Still, I want to double again in 2012 so this means taking a deeper dive into what I did last year, what worked and what didn’t so I can maximize where I put my energy in 2012. So here we go – let’s start with what worked!

Domain Development – What Worked In 2011

• Longtail Domains With The Year In The Domain Name. We did some interesting tests focusing on ranking well for domains with the year in the domain name itself. This test was spurred by a successful site in 2010 that gave me the idea to expand on. This does involve researching the niche you want to enter and determine if people do indeed search for the term with the year either before or after the keywords. One of the sites we built in November ended December with over $330 in revenue on top of over $100 in its first month. All of the domains we developed and tested here were hand-registered .COM’s.
• Tax-Related .US Domains. This has been a big part of our business since 2008 and not much has changed to be completely honest with you. I found something that works and I’ve been sticking with it. What I discovered in 2008 is that .US domains in the tax niche did quite well for me. Targeting lower-volume search terms (typically less than 5,000 exact-match searches) has kept the spaces less competitive and easier to rank in. If you think you can’t outrank a .gov site, think again, you absolutely can! As for the zen and art of .US I’ll have to save this for another post.
• Using WordPress For The First Phase Of Development. 2011 was the first year where we used WordPress as our initial launch platform. While most of our sites were migrated to our own HTML/CSS creations many of them started as WordPress sites. This really streamlined the business and made it much quicker and easier to get going. I still don’t think WordPress is a great mass development tool but it is a good way to get a domain up with some content and ads while allowing for some nice SEO tweaks and interactive features.
• TextBroker. I knew that Elliot had been using TextBroker for a while and he always spoke very highly of it. I had the chance to grab lunch with Elliot in NYC and asked him about it in-person and started using it the very next week. Since 2009 I’ve been using my own team of content writers which has been great but also challenging to manage and maintain quality. So far my experience with TextBroker has been fantastic with lightning-fast delivery times and just the quality level I need to get a site started. This isn’t where you’re going to find your next great passionate writer, but it’s perfect to get a site off the ground without spending too much.
• Facebook Fan Pages. This was one of the biggest contributors to the increased traffic we saw in 2011. Four of our top brands ended 2011 with over 1,000 Facebook Fans. In all cases we’ve found these fans are very interactive and provide nice targeted traffic to our sites. This has also been great for negotiating direct advertising deals as it shows the following that your brand has.
• Building Less Sites. My team built-out fewer properties in 2011 than in 2010, and were doing it again in 2012. Last year we averaged five sites/month and in 2012 we’ll be bringing it down to four sites/month. This is a pretty big cut down from ten sites/month previously. By building less sites we’ve been able to put more focus (and me more capital) into each.
• Leveraging WordPress Plugins. This ties-into my earlier comment about using WordPress in the first phase of development but still stands on its own. WordPress has a very rich plugin library and this has allowed us to add some pretty slick interactive features quickly and easily. We are also using plugins to tweak SEO, evaluate our content, and secure WordPress installations. I still think we’re only scratching the surface here so there’s lots of room for growth in 2012!
• Inbound Direct Ad Deals. This year I saw a very nice increase in the number of interested advertisers across a number of sites. I consider this similar to getting an offer for a domain name. When someone is contacting you then you have a lot more negotiating power. Most of the ad deals we closed in 2011 were inbound usually from the “Advertise” or “Contact” page on the site. If you build a strong brand that becomes well-known in a niche these deals absolutely will start coming-in and it’s a great sign that you’re on the right track!
• Fewer, higher-quality backlinks. We’ve been able to outrank people with 5x the number of backlinks as us with a handful of high-quality backlinks. By using tools like OpenSiteExplorer from SEOMoz allowed us to look at niches where dominant players may only have a few strong links. Remember, like most things in life, it’s not about quantity, it’s about quality.
• Coupon Sites. We made our first entry into the coupon space and will definitely be doing more in it this year, there is definitely a lot of opportunity in this niche.

Domain Development – What Didn’t Work In 2011

• Article Directory Backlinks. Many of the popular article directories got killed by Panda so these links became less valuable in many cases. Article Directories has always been a part of our backlink strategy so we had to change the balance. This doesn’t mean we don’t use article directories any more but we use only a select few and only in specific niches. The SEO world is constantly changing so it’s important to identify things that are working and things that aren’t so you can put your focus in the right place.
• Managing Five Independent Content Writers. Last year it became very challenging to manage so many content writers. One of my writers disappeared off the face of the planet for a couple of weeks in the middle of a project and another found they didn’t have the time to do it any more. Losing a writer (or two) means having to find new writers and adding more to my existing writers plates while I’m doing it. TextBroker really came to the rescue this year and has made this much more efficient.
• Commission Junction Affiliate Offers. I found that CJ performed the worst last year and created the least amount of value per visitor. I still can’t say that I’ve found one killer affiliate program that has knocked my socks off yet. I’ll be at Affiliate Summit next week and look forward to finding some better affiliate programs for 2012.
• Auto-Blogging. We did some tests with auto-blogging last year to see how a site with an auto-blogger installed fared against our standard build. It only took a couple of months to see that auto-blogging was not a comparable solution.
• Travel Sites. In general the travel niche has become very hard to rank well in thanks to Google Local and Google’s focus on brands combined. Most CityName + Hotel or CityName + Restaurant searches are completely dominated by Google local making it very hard to get a meaningful place on page one. With the exception of Civilized Travel, or travel blog that did kick some serious butt last year, all other travel sites were duds so we probably won’t be exploring this space much more in 2012. I’m not saying here that it’s impossible to make money in the travel space, but I am saying that you really have to build a full-scale brand to do it.
• Link Exchanges. I’ve known for a long time that one-way links are where it’s at but never has that been more true than now. We found almost no impact from two-way link exchanges we did last year. Our focus was one-way links but we still did some two-way links but after seeing little to no impact from these we’re going to completely focus on one-way links. Link exchanges are a great way to tell another site you like them and vice-versa, just don’t expect to get much link juice from it.
• Forum Profile Links. These used to work wonders but not any more so we’ve taken this out of our standard backlinks strategy. These links won’t hurt you but they sure don’t give as much juice as they used to.
• Directories. Last but certainly not least is directories. We launched a number of directory sites last year but were only able to make one successful. Making money with a directory site may sound easy, you get a bunch of companies listed in your directory, assume that 5%-10% will pay for listings, and bam, you’re in business. Not true at all, making money with a directory site is hard work. Getting the listings is only a small part of the battle, you really need to show value and that’s hard to do until you’re getting significant traffic. Companies pay to be in directories if they think they’ll have a good conversion rate, if you’re only getting a few hundred visitors/month it’s not likely you’ll provide much value. Like I said we did get one working but it took a lot more work than I expected and I definitely don’t have an easy, replicable model to run with yet.

Of course there are even more things that worked and didn’t work but this is a good high-level summary. Please feel free to share what worked and what didn’t work for you in your domain development adventures last year in the comment section below.

(Photo Credit: Frans Persoon on Flickr)

Have you been a naughty or nice Domainer this year? It doesn’t actually matter to me since my Christmas Newsletter goes to absolutely everyone who signs-up by Thursday, December 22nd! If you haven’t ready my newsletter before, here’s a recent comment from one of my subscribers:

Hey Morgan,
Just want to let you know that I always find a “gold nugget” in everyone of your newsletters.  Please keep them coming! Best, Doug

Every month I write a newsletter that is jam-packed with content. My goal is to leave every single reader inspired and with some great tools and ideas to get going the second they finish reading my newsletter. The focus of my newsletter is content and as you all probably know I’m a big fan of case studies and taking people through techniques step-by-step.

This year my newsletters have been seeing the best feedback, read rate, click-rate, and all those good things that make me know people are loving it. So for Christmas this year, I thought why not put-together my best issue ever as a Christmas gift to all my readers. I’ll be including some freebies, brand new development tips, SEO tips, and sharing one of my most recent (and effective) sales letters.

As always, what you find in my newsletter, you won’t find on my blog. This is an exclusive group of roughly 2,000 people and growing every day! I’m looking forward to welcoming many new readers this Holiday Season. If you want to end this year more excited than ever about 2012, subscribe to my newsletter by 8:00AM PST on Friday, December 23rd.

(Photo Credit: harold.lloyd on Flickr)

In July of this year I announced the relaunch of DomainTheft.org, a centralized Domain Theft database and recovery service. In less than six months we’ve really seen the reports ramp-up and we’re now getting 1-2 theft reports a day. I am excited to say that we have helped three different domain owners recover their domains so far, and are actively involved in two recoveries right now. The recovery process has been different in each case and we’ve spent hours of time on the phone helping victims reclaim their names, all without receiving a dime in compensation, and it feels great!

This has been by far the most rewarding project I’ve worked on so far and my very first non-profit. It feels good to make a difference and since this is something I am very passionate about it’s be incredibly satisfying. Of course, as with any businesses we’re learning new things every day and I thought now would be a great time to share what we’ve learned with all of you. I’ll start with some data on the reports we are receiving and then share some real world tips for keeping your domains safe.

• ~65% of the theft reports we have received were not actual thefts but instead the result of a domain name expiring. Most of the people submitting thefts to us are business owners that often know very little about domain names. They often don’t understand what a renewal is or even that a domain name can expire so the entire process is very confusing for them. We can usually spot these thefts when the report states, “My hosting company stole my domain name.” Luckily we have found that some of these domains aren’t of much interest to domain investors so if they have already expired some owners have been able to hand-register it and reclaim their name. It is these basics that we take for granted, in so many cases the domain owners we work don’t know the first thing about the domain renewal process, or even that they have to renew it each year. It’s been an incredible education process and we helping bring reason and process to an otherwise confusing and scary situation.
• Of the other 35% that are actual thefts, 90% had their domain name stolen due to an email account at GMail, Yahoo, Hotmail or some other free email service. It’s almost the exact same story every time. The thief hacks-into their email account and then go to their registrar account, hits the “Forgot Password” button and then gain direct access to their domains. When the registrar looks at the transaction it appears that the domain owner legitimately logged-into their account and transferred the domain to the another person.
• 5% of the thefts we’ve received have involved talking with both sides of the theft. That’s right, we’ve actually spoken on the phone with both the domain owner and the alleged thief. In all of these cases the alleged thief claims that they did not steal the domain and that it was legitimately transferred to them. These are all personal disputes with people who know each other so the details can be quite complex. We are working on a very interesting case right now and look forward to getting to the bottom of what really happened.
• 80% of our reported thefts have been .COM domains. I don’t think this means that .COM domains are more likely to be stolen but instead that most people own .COM’s. For your average business owner .COM is king and it seems that most businesses would rather have their second or third choice .COM than a .NET, .ORG or any other TLD.
• 2% of our reports have been from domain investors. A very very small percentage of people submitting thefts to us are domain investors, we’re really dealing with end-users often business owners that own one or two domains. It’s amazing to hear how people heard about DomainTheft.org, one person told us that they called someone at Yahoo who referred them to us!

How To Keep Your Domains Safe

Based on all the thefts we’ve seen here are a few good ways to keep your domains safe. There are of course many other precautions you can take but this is a good foundation for domain security.

1. Don’t use a GMail, Yahoo, Hotmail or any other free email service as the admin contact for your domain. These services have lots of security holes and since your email address is all someone needs to access your domains it is critical that you keep your email secure.
2. Don’t give your registrar account login/password to anyone unless you really trust them. We’ve heard some sad reports from people who gave their password to an outsourced employee they were paying $2/hour. Trusting someone you’ve never met and that you haven’t built-up trust with yet is a dangerous idea. Change your own nameservers, create your own email accounts, do all the registry-side changes yourself or with someone you know and trust.
3. Keep your domains locked. This may seem like a basic one but it’s a small step that can make a big difference.
4. Use a well-known registrar. If you’ve never heard of a registrar before, and they’re located somewhere you’ve also never heard of, and their site looks like it was designed by your six year-old cousin, don’t keep your domains there. There are so many well-known registrars that you know are 100% legitimate businesses – stick with these.
5. Keep your WHOIS contact information up-to-date. It is so important to have all of this information current. In most cases the only way you will find-out a domain is expiring (outside of logging-into your registrar account) is via email. If your email address has changed and you don’t get the email your domain might expire without your knowledge.

Stay-tuned! This is still only the beginning and I will continue to update all of you on our progress, what we’re learning, and how you can keep your domain names safe.